I'm loving these posts kn0thing, thank you. We've heard comparatively little about what it was like building and selling Reddit and it's probably the one I want to know the most about.

I'm guessing kn0thing was referring to the parent comment of his comment, not the Reddit post itself.

I think this is right on. Users come first and everything else will fall into place. (I'm not saying to ignore everything else, but making users number 1 and letting everything else fight it out for number 2 seems like the best way to work.)

I feel compelled to play devil's advocate on this one: not all popular sites wind up with happy endings (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/06/figuring_it_out.ph...).

I understand the aversion to drowning users with ads, but still, many sites use ads without nauseating the users to generate decent ad revenue. Why was it so hard to do it for reddit?

That seems too random -- even by Internet standards...